19 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Nature - Gurwinder Bhogal - #1073

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
It's been too long, man. You write these awesome things on the Internet. This is the eighth time we've done this now. For the people that haven't seen you before, you come up with some of my favorite aphorisms and insights and stuff. We're kind of like the Bonnie Blue of interesting insights about the Internet. We're just taking whatever we get. It's high-velocity stuff. The first one that I want to get into, the oxytocin paradox. This is one of yours. Oxytocin, the love hormone, can also make people spiteful. Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion. It's often adjacent to it. For instance, the platform most dominated by social justice activists, Blue Sky, is also the one with the highest support for assassinations. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity.

**Gurwinder Bhogal** (0:47)
Yeah. This is a finding that I came across quite recently, but it confirms something I've long known, which is that people who outwardly express a lot of empathy tend to also be equally capable of cruelty to that same extent. I first learned about this from a book called Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, who's a psychologist. In this book, I think you've had him on the show, he basically talks about how people tend to assume that empathy is just a good thing overall, that we need more empathy, that empathy is in short supply. But really, empathy is in-group loyalty, that's what it is. It's because we're tribal animals, and what empathy is, is when you empathize with someone, the way he describes it is you don't empathize with everybody at the same time, you empathize with select people. The way he describes it is that empathy is like a spotlight. So you shine it on people, a small group of people at a time, or just an individual at a time. While you have empathy shined on that person, everybody else is in darkness, which basically means that you don't have any real feelings for that person that's outside of that spotlight. So what this can mean is that if you empathize, so let's take a real-world example. Let's say you're somebody who empathizes with the plight of the Palestinians. So you'll have a lot of love for those people, and you'll be very, very concerned about them. But there's a kind of yin-yang effect where, because you have so much concern for them, you have negative concern for Israelis. So it's not like you just have love for one group of people, and then everybody else you're neutral to. It can actually have almost like a zero-sum effect. The more empathy you have for one group of people, the less empathy you have for other people. And this is, I think, a major driver of sort of cruelty and spite in the world. When you consider like the people that go out there and commit political violence, what you often see is that these people empathize very strongly with one group of people. So again, if we go with the Palestinian analogy, a group like Hamas, for instance, Hamas have a lot of empathy for Palestinians, at least they do claim to.
But then that equates also to hostility, corresponding to hostility, proportionate to Israelis. You see it also with, again, with the example that I gave in that piece, which is about blue sky. So blue sky obviously is where all the social justice people hang out. It's basically all the refugees from Musk's ex. So these are all people that you would think would be extremely compassionate, extremely empathic, and they are. They are, but only to a small group of people. For example, the left, when they call for empathy, they don't call for empathy for right-wingers. They call for empathy towards immigrants or towards trans people. So their empathy is very selective. And this is why, when you look at recent research, you find that the amount of support for assassinations is strongest amongst the people that you would expect to be the most compassionate, basically.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
Well, you saw that with Luigi Mangione, right? That he had a manifesto. He was very empathetic toward people who had been screwed over by healthcare services, people who had had their healthcare denied and their claims that had been rebuked due to, you know, squirrely manipulation behind the scenes. And that resulted in him shooting a guy in the head.

**Gurwinder Bhogal** (4:34)
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yes, I sort of met Luigi in 2024 And he seemed like a really nice guy, you know. I can't say a single bad thing about him from our conversation. He really did seem like a generally nice person.